CHAPTER III

Summary

After the decline of the Roman empire, the cultivation of physical science was first revived with some success by the Saracens, about the middle of the eighth century of our era. The works of the most eminent classic writers were purchased at great expense from the Christians, and translated into Arabic; and Al Maraûn, son of the famous Harûn-al-Rashid, the contemporary of Charlemagne, received with marks of distinction, at his court at Bagdad, astronomers and men of learning from different countries. This caliph, and some of his successors, encountered much opposition and jealousy from the doctors of the Mahomedan law, who wished the Moslems to confine their studies to the Koran, dreading the effects of the diffusion of a taste for the physical sciences. Almost all the works of the early Arabian writers are lost. Amongst those of the tenth century, of which fragments are now extant, is a system of mineralogy by Avicenna, a physician, in whose arrangement there is considerable merit. In the same century also, Omar, surnamed “El Aalem, ” or “the Learned, ” wrote a work on “the Retreat of the Sea.” It appears that on comparing the charts of his own time with those made by the Indian and Persian astronomers two thousand years before, he had satisfied himself that important changes had taken place since the times of history in the form of the coasts of Asia, and that the extension of the sea had been greater at some former periods. He was confirmed in this opinion by the numerous salt springs and marshes in the interior of Asia; a phenomenon from which Pallas, in more recent times, has drawn the same inference.